print May 1963

Jasper Johns

Although this is a slight rephrasing of the Johns statement presented at the Everett Ellin Gallery in Los Angeles last winter and it no longer promises more than it can deliver, this show still invokes much the same reaction that Donald Factor reported in the February issue of Artforum. It is a tantalizing affair—a little like smorgasbord in that it offers more in variety than in sustenance and it leaves you hungry for more. This vague sense of dissatisfaction seems to be due less to the quality of the work than to a peculiarly local situation. It points up the fact that when a famed New York

print March 1963

Lionel Feininger, “Graphics and Watercolors from the Scheyer Collection of the Pasadena Art Museum”

Exhibitions like this make one wonder how museum employees occupy their time. Here is a show consisting of only about thirty small works by a recognized and well documented artist, all of which belong to a single museum and were originally brought together by a single collector, who was a close friend of the artist; yet there is no catalog, half of the works are not dated (even approximately), and many of the titles are given unnecessarily in German. This last in spite of the fact that the artist spent the last twenty years of his life in this country—a fact that would escape the general public,

print March 1963

James Suzuki

Suzuki shows a series of paintings done since September in which he attempts to conciliate the current vogue for hieratic, regularized images with the format of shallow space, unrestricted range of color and texture, and all-over organization that survives from his earlier Abstract Expressionist style. In each painting circle forms of various sizes, singly or in groups, skirmish with a whole battery of contesting elements: sketchy A. E. brushwork, drips, stains, banners, hearts, arrows, letters, plus quantities of those restless, doodle forms that recall Pollock of the mid-forties (except that

print March 1963

Shirley Rousseau-Murphey

This artist works around a predominantly pictorial idea, drawing out large, vigorous forms of welded junk metal in a shallow relief space. Even her free-standing pieces are planar, with diagonal (Growth Thought) or angular (Bird Bath) thrusts that minimize both volume and mass. Rousseau-Murphey does not, however, strain after the pretty effects that so often are corollary to an interest in surface; textural manipulation is kept at a minimum and, even when an occasional jagged chunk of melted glass is set in contrast to a rusted metal surface, the effect is not overly decorative. Her imagery is

print March 1963

Irene Lagorio

Flora and fauna (both real and imaginary) are stylized in cheery, decorative forms that recall Synthetic Cubism in one group and Northern European folk art in the other.

—Betty Breckenridge